Stars in a Private Movie
by spark fanfic
Summary: Five things that never happened to Catherine Willows.


Stars in a Private Movie  
  
i. lost highway  
  
Hip cocked, Catherine pointed herself at the on-ramp. It was two days since her thirteenth birthday and she was conducting a test, a scientific experiment to see how she'd changed overnight. Whether her body felt and looked different in the overripe sun. She crossed her wrists on top of her head, stretched her legs out to soak up all the daylight that was left.  
  
A cowhide-patterned backpack rode her shoulders. Cutoffs and one of Bridget's shirts, a lacy pink peasant top that would show a bra so she didn't wear one. It was getting colder and Catherine liked it, thrilled by the goosebumps spiraling up her arms, the breeze throwing her hair around. Her smile glowed, a signal to the green pickup truck that slowed toward her, stopped with its nose practically at her feet. It was new, this power, and it made her heart race.  
  
The driver leaned out of the open window, blond hair, sunburned face, and said, "I'm headed to Seattle. That okay?"  
  
It made her heart race. She sucked on her lower lip for a second, thinking, it wasn't that far. She had twenty dollars on her and Seattle wasn't that far. Her parents would send someone after her if she called. Her parents were always after her. She circled the truck and hoisted herself into the passenger seat.  
  
"Cute bag," he said.  
  
"Uh, thanks." She hated 'cute.' She threw the bag on the floor, pressing her knees up against the dashboard.  
  
The truck juddered to a start and Catherine glanced automatically at the seatbelt. Good to know it was there. His hands rubbed the wheel. "I'm Lance," he said, as if she'd asked.  
  
She hesitated. "Brenda."  
  
"Right. Brenda. Nice to meet you." He tried to wink at her in the rear view. She rolled her eyes. "Mind getting my smokes for me? They're in the glove compartment."  
  
She popped the compartment open. There was a beat-up road map, crumpled napkins from a Dairy Queen, and a pack of Camels. No one she knew smoked Camels. "Can I have one?"   
  
"Sure." Lance pushed the dashboard lighter in. After a minute he motioned for the cigarettes. He stuck both of them in the corner of his mouth and lit them before he passed hers back.  
  
As she took her first drag, she looked for her reflection in the windshield. Her face was lost in scratches and dust. The Camel tasted funny, but then, she'd only ever tried Bridget's menthols. Catherine lowered her eyelashes and exhaled slowly so the smoke ribboned around her face.  
  
"So is it too quiet for you?"  
  
His voice startled her. She peeked at Lance from the corner of her eye. He was younger than her parents, maybe twenty-five. "You can turn on the radio if you want," she said.  
  
He laughed. "I meant in Bozeman. Seems kind of boring."  
  
Catherine tapped her cigarette out the window. The breeze caught the ashes and cast them into the stretch of green along the highway, an empty field where some farmer got paid to grow nothing. She studied the smudge her lip-gloss had made on the cigarette. "I get bored," she admitted. "What do you do?"  
  
"I'm a cop," he said.  
  
The smoke caught in her throat, made her cough, made her eyes water. "No shit?"  
  
"Don't worry. You're in good hands." He took his eyes off the road, turning his head to grin at her. One of his front teeth was chipped. "What do you do?"  
  
She shrugged, liking the way he asked, like maybe she was a dancer or a doctor instead of a kid in eighth grade. Her cigarette was almost gone. She stabbed it out in the ashtray.  
  
"I hang around." It was the boring truth. She added a lie: "I have a boyfriend."  
  
"Oh, yeah? What's his name?"  
  
"Skip." Skip was the fat kid who sat behind her in history class, nasal breathing down her neck.  
  
Lance grinned some more and said nothing. He put out his cigarette and flicked through the stations. She wrinkled her nose when he stopped to listen to a song from two or three years ago. What becomes of the brokenhearted/who had love that's now departed? If he liked this stuff, maybe he was older than he looked.   
  
They came up tailing a semi with the letters G.O.D. blaring on the side. Lance slipped into the left lane and passed the truck. He handled the pickup like it was a sports car. Another mile or two and they slid onto the exit ramp. Catherine reached for the glove compartment. "You need the map?"   
  
"I know where we are." His hand jumped from the gearshift to catch her wrist. He moved her hand down to her leg, kept his hand on top of hers.   
  
The empty fields rolled by, turning scarlet as the sun hit the level of the horizon. She had imagined this moment, had imagined the man who would take her away and make her a princess. Strip her of Montana, and daughterhood, and childhood. She had imagined dark hair and eyes and a solemn, soulful kiss, but she thought maybe she could revise the picture if the kiss worked out. I know I've got to find/some kind of peace of mind. His hand was still on hers, his fingers curled around her wrist and into her thin thigh.   
  
He pulled over. When he cut out the engine, the whole world seemed impossibly quiet. "Brenda," he said, drawling the name out. "If you really had a boyfriend you wouldn't be hitching, now, would you?"  
  
"I do what I want," she said. Her voice sounded a little too high. She flipped her hair over one shoulder the way women did in the movies. It was time he kissed her. She parted her lips.   
  
"I've changed my mind about Seattle," he said.  
  
Her eyes opened wide. He'd moved his face close to hers, half-shadowed in the strange low light. His hair looked silver. She tried to make herself smile, but she couldn't do it. "So where are we going?"  
  
"Here. Anywhere." His voice dropped low, almost crooning. He gathered her wrists in one hand and held them, lightly. "Good hands."  
  
His mouth covered hers; it tasted like the cigarette. His tongue pushed against hers as his free hand closed around her neck. She exhaled through her nose and pretended it was a dream, pretended she wasn't trembling. She could still hear the song in her head. What becomes of the brokenhearted?  
  
Pulse pounding inside her ears and behind her eyes as he increased the pressure on her windpipe. Her first scared scream got swallowed in the kiss, a scream no one would have heard. She hardly struggled because she knew it didn't matter. Someone would come after her, someone always had.  
  
And then all the daylight was gone.  
  
*  
  
ii. belle de jour  
  
Her head ached. Ached like every little beam of light was a knife in the center of her forehead. Her throat and nostrils felt raw inside. The taste of dirty metal spread in her mouth. It was all Catherine could do not to lay her head down on the rickety desk.  
  
"Jesus," she sighed, rifling her hands through her hair. She wasn't expecting a reply.  
  
But the instructor looked up at her, furrowed brow and frown from a million miles away, down at the front of the lecture hall. "Did you have a question, Miss--"  
  
"No." Her own voice was too loud. People were looking at her. Crumbles of mascara stained the circles under her eyes, and her hands jittered on top of her notepad. Fuck off, she did not say. I'm not what we're dissecting.  
  
She hadn't written a single word this hour and the notes from her last two classes crawled, illegible, over a page filled with doodled stars. This was so hard: not the work itself, but making herself do the work. Textbooks in her car so she could study between sets at the Palace, assignments inked on the side of her hand, dragging her hangovers out of bed to these lectures and labs. Concentration. That got harder every day.  
  
A big white screen was descending from the ceiling, with a horrible screeching noise. "Once we get through these slides," the instructor was saying, "you should be able to identify petechial hemorrhaging ninety-nine of a hundred times in cases of ambiguous suffocation."  
  
Catherine laid a hand on her forehead and tried to pay attention. Her eyes were puffy, probably as bloodshot as the dead guy's on the screen. Proof, like the cash in her back pocket, that she'd had a good night.   
  
Last night it all clicked into alignment, the lights and music and her flesh thrumming on the same wavelength like the pulse of the sun itself. She'd been coiling and uncoiling at the center of the cosmos. Grinding against the pole with her heels in the air and her hair a red-gold riot over her face. The men had kept throwing money at her, and she hadn't studied between sets; she'd ducked backstage with the other girls. Alcohol and powder. A little of both made the cosmos turn.  
  
The instructor jammed on a slide of a four-year-old girl. It flashed once, twice, and that was more than enough. Catherine swept out the back door of the lecture hall, looking nowhere but straight ahead.  
  
At least indoors she'd been safe from the sun. July had been fierce with days just like this, hot enough to melt glass and inhibitions. She fished her shades from the neckline of her tank top. Already she was sweating.  
  
The classes were supposed to get her out of the club. It had seemed such a simple equation. She would take the classes, just one or two at a time, to get her head above water. Get that piece of paper and someday she would--this was the important idea, glowing at the end of the tunnel--be free to do whatever she wanted.  
  
At the moment all she wanted was a beer, a couple of pills, and sleep before she went back to work. Her head hurt too much to drive. She made her way to a pay phone, dug in her pocket for loose change and a business card.  
  
This guy had come around, close to closing, and sent a couple of bottles of Krug champagne backstage. They'd laughed at his mash note, but then someone, Chantal or Daisy, had shaken one of the bottles, brought it out front, and the girls danced with each other in the foam. The guy had showered them with twenties and his cards. His place was called the Kitty Cat Corral. Stupid name. Stupid of the guy to be recruiting at the club; dancers looked down on hookers--though, probably, it was also the other way around. Catherine was the only one who hadn't thrown her card away.  
  
She called the number. They sent her a car.   
  
All the way to Lincoln County, little phrases kept flashing in her mind, this is it and turn back now, and it was like her mother's voice. She rubbed the leftover makeup off her eyes and wiped it on the backseat.  
  
The building was pink and sprawling. Barbie's brothel. And the guy from last night met her at the door, wearing Armani, hair-plugged and tanned within an inch of his life. He matched the building. He looked at Catherine and smiled, showing a lot of teeth. "You burned the place down last night," he said.  
  
"Thanks." Catherine clasped her hands in front, wishing she was wearing better clothes, not the jeans she'd picked up off the bathroom floor. "So what happens now?"  
  
He tilted his head and clicked his tongue. She followed him inside, where it was all polished chrome and smoked glass and potted ferns. It reminded her of a health club. The guy led her straight to his office, motioned for her to sit on the low-slung leather couch. He sat down next to her. His hand was on her knee before she had time to think, Turn back now. This is it.  
  
"You do anything besides dance?"  
  
I'm studying biology, she began to say. Then she realized, obviously, that wasn't what he wanted to hear. She pressed two fingers against the ache in her temple and was clear about it all.  
  
She slid forward on the cushion, touching her tongue to her lower lip. "Many splendors," she said. She let him take the lead in pushing her down to the floor. Guys with bottle tans liked that sort of thing.  
  
On her knees, then. She never had to study to be good at this. She held him in place with her hand on his stomach, banished her gag reflex and her mother. Her eyes were open, but unfocused. Words floated through her mind, loose from their meanings. Ambiguous. Cosmic. There were worse things than exercising a God-given talent to pay the bills  
  
Suddenly she sat back on her heels and smiled up at the guy. He was gasping for breath, a hand looped in her hair. "What do you think?"  
  
"You're hired," he groaned. "Jesus."  
  
The air conditioner whirred awake as he guided her head back down.  
  
*  
  
iii. requiem for a dream  
  
She drifted along the bottom of a canyon, beneath layers of haze in a dozen colors. Whatever they'd given her, it was good shit, the pure polar opposite of getting high. She could've stayed on it forever.  
  
As the pain came back between her legs, her clouds turned red. She opened her eyes and said, "It's like I got screwed by a bus."  
  
It came out in a weak little groan. She turned her head to the side, squinting past the needle in her elbow joint, and saw Eddie slumped in a chair, his hand over his face. "Eddie," she said, forcing the syllables past her thick tongue. "Eddie?"  
  
Slowly, he stirred and came over to the bed. "Are you up?"  
  
"I think so." She eased out a sigh. The claws dug into her belly. "What time is it?"  
  
"Uh, seven, seven-thirty, I think."  
  
She'd slept for three hours and that was unfathomably long. All the past night was a blur. Like the streetlights when Eddie was speeding to the hospital, screaming at tourists on the sidewalk, "My wife's having a baby, you assholes!" A blur of the pain, knotting and relaxing and redoubling. A blur of fluorescent light and tears in her eyes, the monitor beeping, voices. One doctor had the nerve to ask whether she'd prefer natural childbirth.  
  
There was only one reasonable thing to do. She grabbed him by the collar and snarled in his face, "Fuck nature." So they'd hooked her to the IV that made the clouds roll in. It became a tug of war between the pain and the drugs. They told her to push. Head thrown back, hipbones spreading. She could smell her own blood, hear her own flesh ripping apart.  
  
She remembered how easy it was to surrender to unconsciousness.  
  
Eddie was looking at her like she had done something impossible. She managed a smile. "Have you seen her?"  
  
He bit his lip and nodded.   
  
"Lindsey Maria Willows." Already she loved the taste of the name, its plain and simple sweetness. "Can you get them to bring her?"  
  
"Catherine..."   
  
A wrinkle appeared between his eyes, the corner of his mouth twitched. It hit her like a bucket of ice water, like a suckerpunch: something was wrong. She tried to sit up, ignoring her body's resistance, clutching at the hem of his wrinkled shirt. "I want to see her. I want to see her now."  
  
He disengaged her hand and stepped back. "I'll talk to someone."  
  
Once he'd gone, the empty room tightened around her, all sharp corners and unyielding white walls. A strange place to be. A strange place to be alone, she thought, shivering. She moved her fingers over her stomach, prodding at the sore spots as much as she could stand, marveling at this new emptiness. It was like she'd been pregnant forever. Almost impossible to believe now that her daughter existed outside her.  
  
She sat very still and waited. Something in the room was ticking, she was sure, though she couldn't see a clock.  
  
Eddie came back with a doctor, the one she recognized from last night, even with his white coat for camouflage. His eyes were inky and sharp; she felt them like pinpricks, but she stared right back. Her fingers gripped the edge of the hard mattress. "Where is she?"  
  
"Mrs. Willows. Your baby's birth weight was significantly low for a full-term delivery, and our standard tests showed--"  
  
She pressed her hand over her mouth, said through her fingers, "Just tell me, just tell me."  
  
The doctor's mouth was a perfect horizontal line. There was nothing to read on his face. "You used cocaine during your pregnancy," he said. "Your daughter was born with respiratory problems and possible brain damage. She's in the NICU; her condition is critical. I'm sorry."  
  
He didn't sound sorry. Not at all. That was the first thing she thought, before the rest of it sank in. She turned her eyes to Eddie, who shook his head, still staring at her. Like he couldn't believe what she'd done.  
  
"Critical?" Her voice was a wispy echo. "What does that mean?"  
  
"She's on a ventilator. Her prognosis is..." The doctor had a big Adam's apple, and it jumped between his words. "Not good."  
  
She pushed herself up, though her muscles cringed in protest and the IV bit into her arm. She could have walked a mile. But Eddie came over and seized her shoulders, pinned her to the bed. Her hands scratched at his wrists. She tried to shout, "You have to take me to her!"  
  
"They called the cops, Cath," Eddie said.  
  
She hated the way his voice sounded, at once like he was hurt and like he wanted to hurt her. Hated the way he was holding her back. "Let me go."  
  
"I'm sorry, Mrs. Willows." The doctor's voice was coming from an impossible distance. Receding. "It's hospital policy. Somebody from Children's Protective Services will speak to you later today."  
  
The doctor vanished. Leaving just the two of them with an evil new energy, heat lightning crackling through the room. She stopped struggling in his grip. "Let me go, Eddie," she said, lowering her voice.  
  
His hands relaxed, but did not move. "So. Now I know."  
  
Her heart had climbed into her throat and was throbbing there. She had to talk past it, to tell him how hard it was. "I tried not to," she murmured. "I tried not to do it."  
  
"Bullshit." He kicked the bottom of the bed. The vibrations made her wince.  
  
"They let you see Lindsey."  
  
"They're gonna put her in state custody, do you get that? If she doesn't..."  
  
Mercifully, he didn't finish the thought. She breathed in and held it until it stung. "I know what I did," she said. Choking on it. "I might never even get to see her."   
  
Eddie's shoulders slackened as he stood up. He pulled his hands away, squeezed fists and then opened them. He turned his palms up and held them out, cupping an imaginary weight in the air. "Small," he said. "Like this."  
  
She copied the weighing gesture. Very, very small. "Are her eyes open?"  
  
He shook his head. "She's got blonde, uh, eyelashes. Almost white."  
  
"Ten fingers?"  
  
"Ten toes." He ran his hand over his face, made a lot of noise clearing his throat. "They have--there are all these tubes and machines. She wasn't moving a whole lot. She was kind of blue."  
  
Her mental picture was very clear; she let her eyes fall shut and saw it all. She could feel it, in Eddie's sandpaper voice and inside her. Worse than labor, this monstrous hollowness. Ten times worse. A hundred. She sank into the pillow, and saw, and felt, and she knew. The haze had burned off, and she was only at the beginning of the pain.  
  
*  
  
iv. blood work  
  
Once, her daddy said that she could shoot the leaves off a shamrock. His confidence had not been misplaced.  
  
The first bullet opened a fist-sized hole in Syd Goggle's chest. When the second caught his shoulder, his head snapped around to look at Catherine. His eyes were black with rage. She saw a word take shape on his lips, a four-letter word, she was sure, and adrenaline jerked the trigger three more times.  
  
His knees hit the concrete and the sledgehammer clattered down beside him, and it was done.  
  
Blood, everywhere.  
  
Gil was on the floor between the washing machines. Trying to get up, and failing; he left smeared red fingerprints on the washer's glossy white. His nose looked broken and something was wrong with his breathing. She wasn't sure where all the blood was coming from.  
  
Somehow she'd gotten down on the floor next to him. "Don't move," she was saying.   
  
He looked at her like he was at the wrong end of a pair of binoculars. Or maybe she was at the wrong end. "You shot him," he said.  
  
She realized that the gun was still in her hand. She set it down. "Yeah."  
  
"He was trying to kill me."  
  
There was nothing in his voice but amazement. Catherine wanted to shout at him. Of course he was trying to kill you, he's a goddamned serial killer. She swallowed it. "It's okay," she told him, the way she'd tell Lindsey over a skinned knee. "Listen to me, Gil. You're in shock."  
  
The corner of his mouth twitched. "So are you."  
  
She hesitated. Probably he was right. Static buzzed in the back of her mind, low-grade, long-distance. Catherine bit hard on the inside of her cheek.  
  
"The ambulance is on the way," she said, pressing her hands against his chest. "Talk to me."  
  
He sucked in a breath and let it out with a wet rattle. His eyelids were drooping. "Dead dog on the beach," he murmured.  
  
"What beach?" She counted three broken ribs. At least one was badly splintered, maybe puncturing the left lung. "Gil?"  
  
"Del Rey."  
  
"When you were a kid?"  
  
"Fourteen." He winced when he tried to nod. "He'd been beaten...badly. Burned a little, too."  
  
"So give me the case-file. Just keep talking." She wished she knew more about internal bleeding. Wished she knew less about the dead and more about how to prevent dying.  
  
The thought froze her, poised with her hands over his heart. She shook her head, hard, a fierce silent negative. There was no sound of approaching sirens. Goggle's corpse was a dark blot in the corner of her vision.   
  
She brought her hands down to the sides of his neck. The pulse jumped out of rhythm in his jugular. Just keep talking. "Tell me about the dog."  
  
"Beating was peri--" Another breath, ending in a cough this time. "Perimortem. It was poison. Kids'd kept him in a garage for a week. Maybe two."  
  
"You were just a kid," she said. Trying to picture it. Brown hair instead of gray, skinny grim-faced Gil, all that serious weight in the gangly body of a teenage boy. He'd been this way forever. Gently, she wiped at his face. "So how'd you figure all this out?"  
  
"Maggots."  
  
She shuddered. "Of course. What else?"   
  
"Knew we'd get him."  
  
"The dog killer?"  
  
"The strangler. Knew we'd get him." The coughing got worse. Catherine inched closer so that she could lift his head. She reached out with her right hand--  
  
Gil said, "As long as we didn't run out of time..."  
  
--and found the back of his skull a soggy mess. Laceration and fracture. She had gotten her fingers into wounds like this before. Not while they were still warm and wet.   
  
She looked down into his glazed eyes and felt a wide space between the two of them, wider every second. He was lying there, moving away.  
  
"...Always catch it," he said. "There's always that one detail."  
  
"Yes. You do." She didn't dare move her hand. Instead she applied pressure, her palm an inadequate tourniquet. She picked his left hand up in hers. He didn't seem to notice.  
  
"Roach poison." His voice had faded to a whisper, or maybe she was imagining it.  
  
"Did they get the kids who did it?" She felt his nod, watched the pain scudding across his face. "The first case you ever solved," she said.  
  
He turned his head slightly away from her and spat. "That hurt."  
  
Just then he sounded young, as young as fourteen. His blood was a scalding trickle in her hand. Everywhere else she was freezing cold. "You were born knowing how to do this," she told him.  
  
"Yeah."  
  
Definitely a whisper. "Look at me," she said. He didn't.  
  
"I didn't think he would hurt me..."  
  
She bent down so that their foreheads were almost touching, and sighed. "Oh, God, Gil, he's a crazy fucking--he was waiting for the chance."  
  
"You knew." He curled his fingers around her left hand. "You knew he would."  
  
There had to be something she could do, some pressure point. Something to do with ice or water or oxygen. Tricks of the trade. All she could think of was that neither of them should move. Despite the cold, she realized she was covered in sweat, that it was stinging her eyes.  
  
Her voice came calmly. "Yes. And I knew I'd stop him. Now look at me."  
  
His eyes gave the barest flicker toward her.  
  
"Good," she said. "Talk."  
  
He moved his lips, but nothing came out for a long, an endless moment. Then a sputter. Then: "You're good at this."  
  
"You taught me, remember? And you were born knowing."  
  
"Not--not enough." His pupils narrowed and saw her, really saw her. "Saved my..."  
  
Two things happened at once: She heard the scream of the ambulance, and his hand seized in hers.  
  
As the paramedics stormed in, he was writhing from head to toe, blood spilling from the corner of his mouth. Her fingers were crunched in his grip. They wrenched her loose. Then, somehow, she was on her feet, banked against a dryer, watching them work. It felt like she'd been thrown to the other side of the world.  
  
He was hidden from her and still she knew when he'd stopped moving.  
  
There was a sickening sound, a squelch, when they peeled him off the concrete floor. There was tissue in the pool of blood, and the prints of her knees. There was a horrible smell in the claustrophobic room. Several horrible smells. Bile rose in the back of her throat.  
  
A uniform cop had materialized from somewhere. He threw Catherine a fearful look. "I--I'm gonna need to take your gun," he stammered.  
  
She shrugged and pointed with her wet, red hand. There was always that one detail.  
  
*  
  
v. one true thing  
  
Six months after the night of the accident, Catherine was the one who still had nightmares. Who turned in her sleep, in the coils of the sheet, and woke up with every muscle rigid, whispering, "Baby?"  
  
She'd been crying. She sat up and hugged her knees. Her eyes cleared, adjusting to the half-light that came through the curtains. Outside, the night was cold and clear. Dry. She unwound the sheet from her ankles and got out of bed to walk, pale and wobbling, down the hall.  
  
Lindsey's door was closed; she was already showing a teenager's taste for privacy. Catherine eased it open slowly, listening for the creak of the hinges. Lindsey didn't stir. She slept with the pillow cuddled to her cheek. Her breath went in and out in perfect rhythm, undisturbed.  
  
A PowerPuff Girls clock ticked, out of sight on Lindsey's wall. Lindsey said she dreamed about mermaids. She wore out every shade of turquoise in the crayon box to draw them. Mermaids. In the desert. Catherine reached up to rub her shoulders. They were sore to the touch, as if she'd been carrying around something heavy.  
  
The clock kept ticking.  
  
For a long time she stood still, wishing she could fall into the easy sleep, absorb the rise and fall of it. Behind her, a light came on. Footsteps descended the stairs, came back, and waited for her to turn around.  
  
She turned around. Eddie was twisting the cap off a bottle of beer; it came loose with a sound like a sigh. He took a swig, wiped his mouth on the back of his wrist and passed the bottle to Catherine. She didn't really want it, but an act of kindness was an act of kindness. Still, it was hard to make herself swallow.  
  
"Can't sleep?" he asked.  
  
Her eyes narrowed. "How'd you guess?"  
  
"Cut me some slack, it's two in the morning." He tipped his head back and yawned, as if to underline the point.  
  
"I just got up to check on Lindsey." She fumbled the door shut behind her, let her back lean against it. "I thought I heard something."  
  
"Uh huh."  
  
They stared at each other. She bit her lip. White lies were her first line of defense. She'd spent half her life lying convincingly, to her parents first, to lawyers and suspects, to strangers. The fact that Eddie, Eddie goddamned Willows, could still see right through her--she frowned to herself and took another drink.  
  
"It was just a dream," she said.  
  
He scratched his stomach through his T-shirt. "You been dreaming a lot lately."  
  
For six months the nightmares had been plucking at her nerves. Nightmares of blood and shrapnel in the water, nightmares in which they called her and she couldn't swim fast enough, or deep enough. Nightmares. That was all. She didn't want to talk about them, to give them a chance to take shape. She shrugged and glanced at Eddie through loose strands of her hair.   
  
"Lindsey's doing good," she said.  
  
Eddie nodded. "You don't have to...be so hard, Cath." He grazed two fingers along the outside of her arm. "I mean, you don't have to prove anything."  
  
She opened her mouth to say, Yes, I do. When they were married, and twice as much after she left him, she'd always had to prove how hard she was. That she could handle anything and walk away, with a toss of her hair and a triumphant smile.  
  
She opened her mouth and said, "You could have died."  
  
The words stopped in the air. Nothing moved.  
  
He kissed her in his familiar way, spreading his hands against her hips. At the first pressure of his mouth a ripple went through her, of mixed desire and dread. She didn't say another word. She didn't resist.  
  
Lying belly-down on the bed, she couldn't see his face, or the scars that she knew he had. She imagined she could feel their shapes as he pushed against her. From the bullet, from the surgery, from the drain. It wasn't great sex--it never had been, except when they were fighting, and they were far from fighting now. Her old sustained rage at him was gone, with the rest of the wreckage. She just missed him.  
  
He heaved his body away from hers, kissed her cheek and fell instantly, utterly asleep. She washed her mouth out with a gulp of beer, settling back to stare at the ceiling. At some point she must have slept, too.   
  
In the morning she took a long shower, hot enough to turn her skin tender as a fruit freshly out of the peel. Eddie was in the kitchen with Lindsey, drawing a maple syrup smile in her oatmeal. Catherine left for work with the sound of their laughter at her back.  
  
"Possible murder-suicide at the Trop," Gil said, as she walked into the lab. He was busy filling his pockets with extra pairs of gloves.  
  
She stopped in the doorway. "Do you want me to come with you?"  
  
Gil's shoulders rose up under his jacket. He turned and threw her a look that went straight into her, straight through. Made her transparent and not very deep. "If I need someone, I'll call Nick or Sara," he said.  
  
She did not actually flinch. She had that much presence of mind. "Listen," she said, and instantly hated her throat, for the little wet catch she knew he'd heard. "Are you trying to keep me on lab duty, or--"  
  
"They're up for promotion." He fussed with the gloves, keeping his eyes downcast. "They need the time in the field."  
  
"And it's not that you have a problem with me?" She put her chin up and her hands on her hips, tough girl pose. Almost a come-on.  
  
His eyes ran over her again. Silence flowed around them, filled up the room. Drowning out everything else.  
  
"No."  
  
Until then she hadn't known he could look at her and tell a lie. He stepped past her and was gone.  
  
Alone in the lab, she put her hands on the counter to feel its solidity. And because she'd lost her footing. She locked her fingers to the cool, hard surface and reached into memory for the sound of her daughter's laughter, and Eddie standing over her. Safe. If she could keep them together, she could keep them safe.  
  
Catherine pulled herself up a little straighter, blinking the sleep out of her dry eyes. Fuck you, she thought, almost said, to the space where Gil had just been. Under the force of daylight, everything evaporated except the truth, as hard as her bones: she could have done worse. The worst hadn't happened. 


End file.
